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A lot of user generated prices are a nwish list maybe? What they want it to be worth?

CAD,

If Cuss A and Cuss B are both tradingcarddb.com members, neither would be wrong to log on and record their purchase price. And if they were the only members to ever record a price for that card on the site, then the price would be $2. In my opinion, that's not a bad "estimate" of how much the card is worth---two buyers just purchased it for somewhere in that ballpark, one bought the card as an opportunity, and one "inflated" the price out of scarcity or necessity. Either way, both were willing to pay what they paid and both their prices were valid, so if the card never sells again, then the card is worth ~$2, which is certainly more helpful to the layman collector than "Check Pricing" or logging onto an online auction site to discover that the card has not sold in the last 90 days. (The only real problem would be if they recorded each other's purchase, thus logging them twice)

You've never "overpaid" for a card, unless you purchased it under duress. In my opinion, you should have kept all your "inflated" prices on the site. There is no shame in being the guy who paid "too much" for a card, if it was what you wanted/needed at the time, and the price was one you were willing to pay. I see no issue with someone posting a "high" price for a card, my contention is when someone posts three obviously imagined prices on the exact same day to change the checkllist price of a card with minimum effort, because they "want" it to be a certain price. There are examples of that throughout the site and it detracts from the credibility of the pricing on this site.

Pricing is simple: what someone pays for it, is what it is worth. The more times we are able to record when someone was willing to purchase the card, the closer we can come to a "fair market value" and a range of sales prices (the accuracy of this range is almost more important than the accuracy of the median price, because if I can buy 100x a card for $100 and sell them for $20/each, that's an investment that may be worth my time---even as a pure collector, why wouldn't you entertain the notion of buying 100, selling 5, and owning the other 95 free and clear?)

vroomed,

I totally agree with everything you said.

We could probably even do some analysis (once the grading is standardized across the site) to determine actual percentages of different grades to tweak the percentage calculation. For example, maybe POOR is 7.5% of MINT, or FAIR is 14% of mint. This would require consistent data, and some hearty analysis, or maybe even a machine-generated calculator to calculate the "correct" percentages to match the data.

Another idea I've had, but haven't put out yet (but is somewhat "Beckett-ish") is using "common" tags or "star" tags or "HOF" tags attributed to PIDs to indicate when a card is simply a "common." This way the site could list a card without any recorded prices as the "common" price for that set/insert. However, if the player, has any tags other than "common", then the site would list the price as "Check Pricing" as it currently does. Likewise, if someone enters a price for a "common" card, then the site would calulate the recorded price as it does with any other card. Obviously, "RC", "ERR", "VAR", "SP", "SN", "PR", "MEM", etc. would still need to default to "Check Pricing" Either way, this "common price" could be marked with an asterisk indicating to the collector that the card price is simply the "common price" and the card has no recorded sales and the PID has no tags that make it worthy of a "higher" price. This all would enable more pricing listed on the site and save time for us "pricers" to hone in and target those cards that require more detailed pricing or target those unusual "commons" that have unique pricing (1990 Fleer Uribe).

As you've mentioned, that would require some significant code work, so just putting it out there to see if anyone thinks that would even be worthwhile.

No problem, Sportzcommish!

Still curious if anyone knows why the prices of the cards fell so much in June, per the site.

I've never noticed that feature until now. It would be cool to click on one of those days and see what changed.

Then, we could follow Sportlots and just assign $.18 or whatever for commons. Why not?

Did you move any cards around, add cards, delete cards, or build a new collection? Each collection has its own price history, and since I've been moving cards around and adding cards to various collections as I catologue cards which has my collection price history bouncing up and down. Or it could be that someone put lower prices in for the cards in your collection which reduced the price. I can say for certain that if you had a lot of Bonds XRCs worth $20 each they might be somewhere around $6 or $7 now...

Alex Matthew wrote:

No problem, Sportzcommish!

Still curious if anyone knows why the prices of the cards fell so much in June, per the site.

Sportzcommish wrote:

Alex Matthew, I understood what you alluded to as I've used it, too. It seemed like you didn't take offense at my question as I was simply making a point that as a hobbyist I find value in what I have because I have it, not because someone else maneuvers its value for me.

If I had pricing turned on it would probably show the 1990-91 Hoops Mark Jackson card up there with my PSA 8 Kobe Bryant RC. I'm sure you'd chuckle as I do when encountering such data.

I have seen a lot of entries for $.18 in the pricing that I believe was driven by Sportlots pricing. The issue here is that $.18 is because they have a minimum price. It isn't a good representation when a Joe Montana card is $.18 but so is a Brent Fullwood card. Based on what I see in my area on cards bought and sold there should be a differentiation in an inexpensive HOF player card and an inexpensive guy who maybe had a cup of coffee in a major sport.

This may open up another discussion point. Are junk era commons even worth a penny? What we really need is another decimal place instead of having to round to a penny on junk era commons!